Tag Archives: Lighting

Resurrecting Dead LED Lightbulbs

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If you’ve gone down the lighting isle of a store recently, you’ve no doubt noticed we are firmly in the age of the LED light bulb. Incandescent bulbs are kept in small stock for those who still have the odd-ball use case, there’s usually a handful of CFL bulbs for those who don’t mind filling their house with explosive vials of hot mercury, but mostly its all LED now. Which is as it should be: LED lighting is clearly the superior choice in terms of energy efficiency, lifetime, and environmental impact.

Unfortunately, a lot of the LED bulbs you’ll see …read more

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Friday Hack Chat: All About LED Design

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There are three great enabling technologies of the last twenty years. The first is lithium batteries that hold a lot of juice. Quadcopters wouldn’t exist without them, and the Tesla Model S wouldn’t either. The second is crazy powerful brushless motors. Here, again, quads wouldn’t exist without them, but we’re also getting smaller, torquier, and more powerful motion platforms.

The third great enabling technology in recent memory is LEDs. Remember when the PlayStation 2 came out, and everyone was amazed by the blue LED? That blue LED won a Nobel Prize. Now, we have LED light bulbs, LEDs in any …read more

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An Enchanted Rose For A Beauty

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Being a maker opens up so many doors in terms of ways to romance one’s partner through passion projects. If their passion is Disney films, then you may handily make them the enchanted rose from Beauty and the Beast for their birthday. Easy-peasy.

In addition to the love and care that went into this build, redditor [Vonblackhawk2811] has included a set of LEDs, salvaged from cheap flashlights and electronic candles, which are controlled by four toggle switches and offer multiple lighting selections — candlelight, soft white, colour cycling, and bright white — to appropriately set the mood. As if that …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Modular Rail Lighting

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When operating any kind of hydroponic farming, there are a number of lighting solutions — few of them inexpensive. Originally looking for an alternative to the lighting of IKEA’s expensive hydroponics system, [Professor Fartsparkle] and their colleague prototyped a rail system that allows clip-on LED boards for variable lighting options.

Taking inspiration from wire and track lighting systems, the key was the 5mm fuse holders mounted on the bottom of the LED boards. Snipping off their stopping clip makes them easy to install and remove from the mounting rails. The rails themselves double as power conduits for the LED boards, …read more

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Servo-Controlled IoT Light Switches

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The Internet of Things is fun to play with; there’s all manner of devices to automate and control remotely. It can be sketchy, though — make a mistake when coding your automatic plant watering system and you could flood your house. Make a mistake with a space heater and you could burn it down. Combine these risks with the fact that many people live in rental properties, and it can be a difficult proposition to bring the Internet of Things to your home.

[Suyash] came up with a way around this by building 3D printed light switch covers that add …read more

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Pulley Lamp Stands Up With You

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Standing desks are either the best thing since sliced bread, or the fastest way to make your legs tired and get you ridiculed by your coworkers in the bargain. This leads some folks to compromise and make standing desks that can be re-lowered to sitting height when you need to take a break. But now the distance from your desktop to the light source that illuminates it has changed. We can’t have that!

[John Culbertson] came up with a very elegant solution to the “problem”. He made lights that are suspended on pulleys that raise and lower with the desk …read more

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LED Bulb-shade Cityscapes

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Cost-effective LED lighting for your home has opened up many doors for more efficient living, but also some more creative illumination for your living space. If you want to bring the dazzle of city lights right into your home, [David Grass] has two projects to sate this desire in perhaps the most literal way possible: Huddle and Stalaclights.

These clever, 3D printed bulbshades are possible since LEDs emit very little heat, and can be printed in a variety of designs. Huddle is named for — and illustrates — humanity’s coalescing into cities as the centre of modern life from which …read more

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Landscape Lighting that Also Texts

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Your local hardware store or garden supply center probably has everything you need to install landscape lighting all around your property. What’s a little less likely is coming out of that situation with fewer holes in your wallet than in your yard. And even then, it’s pretty much guaranteed that any off-the-shelf equipment won’t send you a text message when your landscape lighting isn’t working properly. [Mark]’s landscape lighting system does, though!

Powered by a Raspberry Pi, this landscape lighting system has every feature imaginable. It can turn the lighting on at sunset and turn it off at a set …read more

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A Hacker’s Guide to Getting Old

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It’s no surprise that things change as we age, and that tasks that were once trivial become difficult. Case in point: my son asked for help with the cord on his gaming headset the other night. The cable had broken and we could see frayed conductors exposed. When I got it apart, I found that I could barely see the ultra-fine wires to resolder them after cutting out the bad section. I managed to do it, but just barely.

This experience got me thinking about how to deal with the inevitable. How do you stay active as a hacker once …read more

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Six Years of Work and Rationale In A DIY Book Scanner Documented

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[Daniel Reetz] spent six years working as a Disney engineer during the day and on his book scanner, the archivist at night. Some time last year, [Daniel] decided enough is enough, got married, and retired from the book scanner business. There’s a bit more to it than that, but before leaving he decided to dump, not just the design, but the entire rationale behind the design into a twenty-two thousand word document.

One of his big theses in this document, is his perceived failure of the open hardware movement. The licenses aren’t adequate, as they are based on copyright law …read more

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